Upgrading BRICKS—The Context-Aware Semantic Rule-Based System for Intelligent Building Energy and Security Management

Abstract

Building management systems (BMSs) are being implemented broadly by industries in recent decades. However, BMSs focus on specific domains, and when installed on the same building, they lack interoperability to work on a centralized user interface. On the other hand, BMSs interoperability allows the implementation of complex rules based on multi-domain contexts. The Building’s Reasoning for Intelligent Control Knowledge-based System (BRICKS) is a context-aware semantic rule-based system for the intelligent management of buildings’ energy and security. It uses ontologies and semantic web technologies to interact with different domains, taking advantage of cross-domain knowledge to apply context-based rules. This work upgrades the previously presented version of BRICKS by including services for energy consumption and generation forecast, demand response, a configuration user interface (UI), and a dynamic building monitoring and management UI. The case study demonstrates BRICKS deployed at different aggregation levels in the authors’ laboratory building, managing a demand response event and interacting autonomously with other BRICKS instances. The results validate the correct functioning of the proposed tool, which contributes to the flexibility, efficiency, and security of building energy systems.

Accurate Building Energy Management Based on Artificial Intelligence

“…At the closing ceremony of the China-EU High-Level Energy Conference held in Brussels on May 3, 2012, the Premier of the State Council's speech mentioned that joining hands to innovate in the fields of low-carbon cities, green buildings, and energy saving in industry and transportation is one of the key points of the cooperation between China and the European Union [18][19][20]. On May 11 of the same year, the World Bank released a report on the development of sustainable low-carbon cities in China, pointing out that China's "12th Five-Year Plan" emission reduction targets must be realized in "low-carbon cities" [21][22].…”

Supporting Smart Home Scenarios Using OWL and SWRL Rules

“…Indeed, the necessity of an ontology-agnostic approach in SW solutions have been clearly highlighted in [26] for building-level automation systems. In this work, the authors propose BRICK (Building's Reasoning for Intelligent Control Knowledge-based System) as an integrated system for intelligent building energy and security management.…”